Some folks in parts of the world are very reliant on gasoline, while some are more dependent on electric. Petroleum based products however are still in absurd demand by almost all parties. How do you stand to fair if the oil situation continues to worsen? Plastics. Nylon. Jet fuel. Tires. Asphalt. To name just a few things that heavily rely on oil byproduct.
Even though I take an electric bike or electric buses and metros to get to work so I don’t need to burn it to go anywhere myself, but I know that lots of fuel is burned to get stuff to me, from farms and source industries, to processors, to the store.
I do like to travel internationally a few times a year so that really ups my personal carbon footprint and I do expect to get more expensive year-over-year and I may end up going less in the future.
In BC, flexible plastics are recyclable, and I’d even had my prior assumptions challenged by people on Lemmy that virgin plastics formed with by-products of petroleum fuel production (esters) would be too cheap and abundant for recycled plastics to be economical; the oil shock highlights how that may not always be the case.
We’ll need a bit of petroleum for lubrication (machine oil), cooling, jet fuel, a bit gor plastic etc., but we can, even today, replace a good chunk of it relatively quickly and reduce methane and CO2 emissions enough to make a difference and to ride out a shock like this. Synthetic glue took over the need to use animal products for all but the smallest niche of artisans. If electric vehicles, better mass transport, SAF, grid batteries are pushed for mass implementation, our dependence on oil can be massively reduced. Ironically, the biggest oil shills of the world have done more than any environmental activist could hope to accomplish, to show people why complete dependence on oil and fossil fuel is bad.